Six Weeks Later: National HSC still unable to refute evidence amassed in “Lying Religiously”

Six weeks after the CSFH report — Lying Religiously (LyR) — was published with conclusive evidence that the National HSC was part of the RSS family of organizations (Sangh Parivar), the National HSC has failed to refute even a single piece of evidence in our report. Far from providing any substantive counter evidence or argument, officers of the National HSC have resorted to ad-hominems against the CSFH collective.

This strategy is not new. It is typical of the Sangh Parivar. The Campaign to Stop Funding Hate has done investigative work on the Sangh since 2002. In our first report, The Foreign Exchange of Hate, which exposed the flow of dollars from the US to the RSS in India, we used a similar structure of evidence as the current report on the HSCs — a majority of the evidentiary documents were drawn from the Sangh itself. In response, the Sangh Parivar attacked the collective and NOT the report, just like the National HSC leadership has done now. Our response from 2003, entitled Deceit as a Core Value: The RSS Method, is archived here. We urge all HSC members and the Indian-American community at large to take careful note of this pattern — when completely unable to deal with the evidence against it, the Sangh resorts to ad-hominem attacks against its opponents.

In our two earlier press releases, we pulled out evidence from our report and framed it in a simple and easy to understand format and challenged the national HSC to refute the evidence. They have failed to do so in both their press releases. Do we take the national HSC’s silence on the issue as its inability to deny its close links with the Sangh Parivar?

In our effort to keep the focus on the substantive evidence presented in the LyR report, CSFH will in the next 12 weeks send out one question every week to the national HSC leadership with a single issue or piece of evidence for them to respond to. Our reason for this is simple: we want to make absolutely clear to every reader –- and especially, every HSC member past and present — that the National HSC has been deceptive about its connections with the RSS family and its only strategy is to distract from the evidence presented in the report.

Week #1: Why did the National HSC build the Sangh Parivar’s Global Internet infrastructure and why does it continue to maintain it?

In our report, we have documented how the National HSC has built and continues to maintain the Sangh’s Global Internet infrastructure. The evidentiary source for the IP Map is a neutral site, DomainTools. The IP Map is probably the most damning piece of evidence against the National HSC that establishes deep, systematic and undeniable links to the rest of the Sangh Parivar. It is not an incidental set of connections, but a deliberate and carefully built infrastructure. The National HSC has of course remained silent on this. However, some concerned HSC chapter members have written to us directly asking questions. The most often repeated question is whether the IP map shows anything more than some electronic links, and this needs further explanation.

Allow us to explain in some detail: Every machine on the Internet has a unique IP address that reads something like: 206.251.242.160, that is, four numbers separated by periods. Each set of numbers in an IP address that is separated by periods is called an octet (because it is represented in the binary form by a set of eight zeros and ones). Thus an IP address is made up of four octets. For brevity, we will represent an IP address as A.B.C.D where A,B,C and D represent numerical values and are each an octet. How the octet pattern is arranged says a lot about the organization that is using an IP address. For instance, a large network like AT& T will typically have an octet structure where every single machine that it owns on the internet will share the exact same value in the first octet. That is, all of AT&T’s computers on the internet share the same first octet. Such addresses with a common first octet are called Class A addresses.

So also, a large to medium size business could ask for a Class B address where the first two octets (in our scheme, A and B of the A.B.C.D structure) are common for every machine it has on the internet anywhere in the world. Many MNCs have Class B addresses. Finally, smaller organizations could seek and be allotted a Class C address where the first three octets – A, B and C are fixed. Every machine they have on the internet will then have the first three octets repeated and the last octet will change. This is the case for most of the Sangh Parivar organizations hosted by the HSC — they share the first three octets and have CONTIGUOUS fourth octet (as in, say 206.251.242.160 and 206.251.242.161). Furthermore, most of these websites, including those of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (206.251.242.221), Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (206.251.242.229), Vishwa Hindu Parishad (206.251.242.217), Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America (206.251.242.195), India Development and Relief Fund (206.251.242.226), Sewa International (206.251.242.203), Organiser (206.251.242.182) and Akhil Bharthiya Vidyarthi Parishad (206.251.242.198) list Hindunet Inc as the Admin Organization and/or Ajay Shah (the first president of the HSC) as the Admin Name. And the copyright notice on Hindunet says: Please note that entire collection of GHEN websites is copyrighted 1989-1999, Global Hindu Electronic Networks, Hindu Students Council.

In short, the HSC supports the electronic infrastructure of the Sangh Parivar. There is no way for all this to be an accident or a coincidence. In other words, there is no other explanation for this phenomenon but the fact that the national HSC, under the leadership of Ajay Shah, was given this task by the Sangh which they executed faithfully. (For a brief organizational overview of the Sangh Parivar, see here).

CSFH continues to urge all concerned individuals and groups to engage in a substantive public discussion on the issues we have raised in our LyR report. Such open discussions are important within the South Asian community, especially among Indian-American youth, who have been deceived by the National HSC leadership. It is incumbent upon all HSC chapters to begin sorting out the truth from the lies by asking the National HSC leadership to respond to the concrete challenge we have raised above and not produce random distractions.